Tuesday, August 31, 2010

I'm always a little surprised when I go back and listen to a fully produced episode of Radio Free Hipster. Often I will discover that what I thought was a random hodge-podge of styles and artists actually has some unintentional cohesion.

This time around a few recurring motifs became apparent. The first, as the title implies, was auto-tuned vocals. The second, a heavy reliance on radio rock/pop sampling. And then there were the strange tertiary elements – a pair of references to wallhacks, for example.

I'd love to chalk this up to my own innate understanding of songs and songwriting, but mostly it's just good, old fashioned coincidence.

Z's 1st interlude: "We kick pop music… right in its taint"
Which might be my new tagline.

Track 2: Positive Attitude – "Electric Saturday"
Occupying an odd space equidistant from nerdcore hip-hop and the Dementia Music of the FuMP is Ohio's Positive Attitude. If you happened to miss them at Nerdapalooza, be sure to peep their 2009 release The New Fresh. It will clue you in to their unique brand of madness.

Z's 2nd interlude: "He made it just for me."
Big ups to Brux for the custom BGM!

Track 8: ProjektZero – "Dream Harder"
ProjektZero told me this weekend that he's wanted to have a song of his played on RFH since 2007. I reckon that's about the nicest thing anyone's ever said about this show.

Z's final interlude: "There's been a lot of auto-tune in this episode."
Take that, Jay-Z!

Track 13: Tetrastar – "Rainbow in the Dark"
There have been a lot of excellent releases over the past few weeks, but Songs We Didn't Write has been in the heaviest of rotations on my end.

And so with the closing of another episode we creep ever closer to number 100. Now that I at least have a rough idea of that show's concept, I'm a bit more relaxed about this impending anniversary.

Still, before I get too excited about that, I have a lot more ground to cover.

September is Drunken Podcasting Month, so I'll be getting sloshed with Matt and Church, as is tradition. And October will see my annual Halloween Crap-Tacular. So feel free to point me toward your favorite ghoulish jams in anticipation of that.